Closing dead spots is a tedious undertaking, especially at speeds of more than 300 kilometers per hour.

Nobody knows this better than Deutsche Bahn and its customers.

You feel this every day when you try to start a productive job on a business trip with the climate-friendly train.

Corinna Budras

Business correspondent in Berlin.

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Jonas Jansen

Business correspondent in Düsseldorf.

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This can only succeed with a joint effort, which is why three actors came together at Berlin Central Station on Friday to present their project: in addition to Deutsche Bahn, the mobile phone provider Vodafone and the Federal Minister of Transport, Volker Wissing (FDP).

Train passengers should soon be able to use a stable mobile phone connection and "smooth" Internet on long-distance trains.

Enable 5G+

Wissing promised that the situation on the trains would improve “noticeably” this year, and it would soon be the most modern mobility service in Europe.

It should also be fast by mid-2025, added Vodafone CEO Hannes Ametsreiter: bandwidths of at least 225 megabits per second on the main routes of the ICE and IC trains.

The Düsseldorf provider also wants to activate its “5G+” network along these routes, which does not require LTE technology (“5G standalone”) – “5G+” offers particularly short data runtimes, but only for smartphones that are specially equipped for this.

At least 125 megabits per second over almost 14,000 kilometers of track.

This would cover around 21,000 kilometers from a route network that covers more than 33,000 kilometers.

In order for this to succeed, Vodafone has promised

The railways also have a lot to do: they will be making areas and fiber optic infrastructure available along the rails to an even greater extent than before.

She also replaces window panes on the trains so that the radio signals can reach the interior of the trains better.

Telekom should also deliver

Vodafone's commitment is not unique: last June, Deutsche Telekom announced a seamless supply of mobile communications on the rails by 2026.

According to Telekom, it is investing more than 140 million euros in the additional coverage of all routes by 2026.

This should provide between 100 and 200 Mbit per second, the Federal Network Agency prescribes a speed of at least 50 Mbit per second.

She calls her railway project "Black Shepherd Dog", which can certainly be understood as a dig at the telecommunications competition, because their offers still have so many "white spots", as Telekom CEO Tim Höttges explained to the shareholders at the Annual General Meeting on Thursday.

It's about the 33,600 kilometers of rails in Germany and the difficulty of actually getting the signal into the trains.

When an ICE is traveling at 300 kilometers per hour, the signal is transferred to the next radio cell about every 40 seconds on average.

This is already the first susceptibility, but the mobile phone providers are working on it to establish coverage along the route and also in tunnels.

It will be more difficult to get it on the trains: although the railways have repeaters on the roofs of the trains and then in the compartments, only 0.1 percent of the radio signal reaches the train because of the high attenuation caused by the architecture of the train, according to Telekom Really get on the train.

That's ten times less than a car, for example.

The railways therefore want to laser the panes of the new ICE before they are installed in such a way that they let mobile radio waves through.